#Neoreactionary

[lateantiquechud]

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

you said you need a new icon, what would you change it to? the one you have now is cute af

I can't tell what the "fucking" is from. That said, I'll probably just stick with this one for a little while, because it looks good.

(I'm not sure who the person is, but they look cute and I'm grateful they're using "fucking" in the right place.)

[henryrodhamkissinger]

I know Red Scare took a turn for the worse, whatever, this video still is an absolute banger and gives me hope. Critical support to Dasha Nekrasova. “But I just told you they’re eating rats!” Lmao

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Stumbled upon this rattish academic philosopher(?) with a substack complaining about how the "far left" are not willing to try and persuade ppl of their points of view on contentious topics like palestine and instead rely on purely emotional histrionics, citing as evidence that he spent 20min(!?) trying to confront random student protesters about their opposition to israel. Me fuming about this is maaaaybe a version of unproductive hunting for a guy online to get mad at but this is definitely a sentiment i have heard before, that the far left in particular is disinclined to argument and persuasion

My instinct every time someone says this shit is to ask, Have you ever flipped open a copy of jacobin? There are plenty of ppl on the "far left" willing to make this that or the other "case" for their pov if you actually seek out those arguments in the venues typical of lengthy political arguments. The domain of "arguments for why israel is bad and was a mistake" is famously about as richly inhabited as any on any topic. And if you want further left than jacobin (which has an editorial line that would absolutely still qualify as far left from this guys perspective), leninist pamphleteers and anarchist zine-writers are notoriously happy to provide. Some random university encampment foot soldiers arent likely going to be the ones doing that for the same reason the median participant at a hillary rally is not going to be the most eloquent apologist for centrist-wing democrats and an arbitrarily selected guy with a ron paul bumper sticker will not be particularly compelling when speaking on behalf of a return to the gold standard, theres nothing special about the student activists position on the political spectrum here other than thst ppl seem disproportionately likely to expect every "purple-haired androgynous man wearing a shirt that says [queers] for Palestine" to do the job of a professional editorialist for their faction while allowing for intellectual division of labour on others

If you talk to a Curtis Yarvin-type monarchist about the optimal government, they’ll argue about it for hours on end. Neoreactionaries were famous for writing absurdly long articles going back and forth with those who disagreed with them. Because they were fringe, because most people disagreed with them, they didn’t have the presumption that challenging them was gauche or indicative of moral failing. They were willing to get down dirty and argue.

No, man, mencius moldbug was "famous for writing absurdly long articles going back and forth with those who disagreed with" him. I remember the neoreactionary randos when that fad was still ongoing, and they spent most opportunities for debate instead being loudly self pitying. Which is not even really that much of a dig bc "highly articulate propagandist" will be an extreme minority in any political movt larger than a small friend circle of curious eccentrics, that is the whole point! You have to compare apples to apples, and instead of even looking for any you are deliberately hunting down the aisle for oranges and shaking yr head in disapproval

[max1461]

I think I have a tendency to view all culture shifts as bottom-up, because I'm here on the bottom, you know, talking to people, interacting with a wide cross-section of American society that runs from internet weirdos on the one hand to normie boomers on the other. And so as the culture churns through various discourses, I have this tendency to think of it like... I suppose like different bacterial mats growing and competing or coalescing with one another.

Like the rise of Trump in 2016. I tend to think about it like: "ok, c. 2012 you had the normie disaffected Rust Belt guys, and the channer old-internet Welcome to the N.H.K. disaffected nerd guys, and the LessWrong-adjacent pseudointellectual Mencius Moldbug neoreactionaries. Initially these people could not have been culturally farther apart. But then uh... well New Atheism collapsed at the same time that GamerGate was happening at the same time that the internet was becoming IRLified, and the resulting vortex sucked in all three groups and out popped the alt-right and the Greek statue avatar trads and now there are people who were reading Richard Dawkins 10-15 years ago who are Catholic Integralists or whatever. And anyway that whole memeplex unified around Trump and become the culturally generative core of 'Trumpism'"

Well ok, that's my perspective. But then I hear stuff from the top-down view, "oh well, the Republican party has pursued a march through the institutions for several decades now, etc. etc." and I'm always like... well I guess that's true too. How do these things fit together? I want to unify the top-down and bottom-up views. But that's hard to do, not just in this case but in general.

[dead-twink-storage]

Everything must be viewed through the eyes of the terminally online center of the universe American. Is this Indian life insurance ad trying to appeal to neoreactionary incels by portraying a happily married couple? Does this Latvian swimming PSA promote Anti Asian hate and the rise of Trumpian fasicsm because everyone in it was white? Don't they know how serious and important to their lives our consumer gender wars, self contained economic racial strife, and sex politic arguments are to their lives and culture on the other side of the globe?

[reddragdiva]

"Dimes Square" was a Thiel-funded attempt to make neoreaction hip with the youth. Every word out of it is the worst.

Honor Levy is the latest Dimes Square neoreactionary that The Cut did a puff piece on for unclear reasons. https://archive.is/SqSv5

Here's actual text from her actual fucking book. It's "Ready Player One" for race scientists. https://archive.is/WE3Nb

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

The Cut piece just happens to mention how Levy interviewed Curtis Yarvin on her podcast

Brock Colyar at The Cut should know fucking better but shows no evidence of capacity for such

the NYT review: "There is an interesting sense here of young people brought up amid a war — a cultural one." you can tell this guy's been saving that line for a special occasion

filing Levy high on the list of Thiel's crimes

[voorvore]

my nick land memetic parasite I got after exposure to binural hyperoedipalized experimental military furry mommy kink asmr videos: the value of life is negative. the democratic fascist kills himself in preparation for the return of neoreactionary hyperstitional purity culture from the anachronistic past. reddit is a constant cyclical motion of funkopop garbage time.

Nothing normie makes it out of the near future.

6"9' lemurian anthro ghost-lemur datura-smoking mommy spirit guardian: my wittle puppyboy~ mummy wants chu to piss yourself for her~ do it and she'll give chu a treat~

Me: nick land parasite please don't fucking talk about angloid logician "superiority" again. You look like a fucking fish man.

[azspot]

In a darker, perhaps sadder sense, the neoreactionary project suggests that the billionaire classes of Silicon Valley are frustrated that they cannot just accelerate their way into the future, one in which they can become human/technological hybrids and live forever in a colony on Mars. In pursuit of this accelerated post-Singularity future, any harm they’ve done to the planet or to other people is necessary collateral damage. It’s the delusion of people who’ve been able to buy their way out of everything uncomfortable, inconvenient or painful, and don’t accept the fact that they cannot buy their way out of death.

A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World

[sybaritick]

gale and gortash are certainly not going to end up in any sort of normal relationship post-Tephra-Year, but let me shitpost about how if they did you just know Gale would be that girl apologizing for her neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment eugenicist boyfriend whenever he's not around. he's entitled to his beliefs, it's more nuanced than it looks, etc. 😂 clearly it must not bother you THAT much or you'd stop dating him, Gale...

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Everybody keeps talking to you about this Frank person. Like, what's up with that? Do you know?

I am Frank.

[ashleyetc]

really funny thing abt grimes whole. everything. is that nobody fucking gives a shit about her music anymore it seems like. when was the last time you had someone bring her up in the context of her music and not in the context of her being a rich neoreactionary cuz for me i think it has actually been years

[max1461]

I've said this in various different ways before, but the third dimension of the political compass should something like "technocrat vs. [whatever the opposite of a technocrat is]". On the technocrat side you've got Bolsheviks, neoliberals, those neoreactionary eugenics guys, and in a more moderate sense almost everyone with any influence in tech. On the anti-technocrat side you've got most anarchists, paleocons, anti-civ people, hippies, Q-anon, and in a more moderate sense most people who do literary theory. This political axis continues to be highly salient to me, in spite of relatively few people openly seeming to acknowledge it. And it's an axis on which I am a very decided centrist (being a centrist on an axis nobody's ever heard of makes me feel double superior). I used to spend a lot of time honing arguments against anti-technocrat positions, especially those common in the humanities (given the environment I was largely surrounded by at my small liberal arts college). Now that I'm surrounded by mostly technocrats, I spend much more time arguing with them instead. You know how it goes. Well anyway.

[nicklloydnow]

“Monarchies are the semi-organic outgrowth of hierarchically structured natural - stateless - social orders. Kings are the heads of extended families, of clans, tribes, and nations. They command a great deal of natural, voluntarily acknowledged authority, inherited and accumulated over many generations. It is within the framework of such orders (and of aristocratic republics) that liberalism first developed and flourished. In contrast, democracies are egalitarian and redistributionist in outlook; hence, the above-mentioned growth of state power in the 20th century. Characteristically, the transition from the monarchical age to the democratic one, beginning in the second half of the 19th century, has seen a continuous decline in the strength of liberal parties and a corresponding strengthening of socialists of all stripes.” - Hans-Hermann Hoppe, ‘Reflections on State and War’ (2006)

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

[reddragdiva]

LessWrong: Where's the economic incentive for wokism coming from?

yes really, that’s literally the title of the post. (archive copy, older archive copy) LessWrong has gone full Motte.

this was originally a LW front-page post, and was demoted to personal blog when it proved unpopular. it peaked at +10 and is currently at -6.

but if anyone tries to make out this isn't a normative rationalist: this guy, Michael “Valentine” Smith, is a cofounder of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), a LessWrong offshoot that started being about how to do rational thinking ... and finally admitted it was about "AI Risk"

this post is the Rationalist brain boys, the same guys who did FTX and Effective Altruism, going full IQ-Anon wondering how the market could fail so badly as not to care what weird disaster assholes think. this is the real Basilisk.

when they're not spending charity money on buying themselves castles, this is what concerns the modern rationalist

several commenters answered “uh, the customers.” and tried to explain the concept of markets to OP, and how corporations like selling stuff to normal people and not just to barely-crypto-fash. they were duly downvoted to -20 by valiant culture warriors who weren’t putting up with that sort of SJW nonsense.

comment by author, who thinks "hard woke" is not only a thing, but a thing that profit-making corporations do so as not to make a profit: "For what it's worth, I wouldn't describe myself as leaning right." lol ok dude

right-wingers really don't believe in, or even understand, capitalism or markets at all. they believe in hierarchy. that's what's offended this dipshit.

now, you might think LessWrong Rationalists, Slate Star Codex readers, etc. tend towards behaving functionally indistinguishably from Nazis, but that's only because they work so hard at learning from their neoreactionary comrades to reach that stage

why say in 10,000 words what you can say in 14.